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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

>"Some of you might also be wondering what these words mean in light of us saying we achieved gold master some time ago. Passing certification, or 'going gold', means the game is ready, can be completed, and has all content in it. But it doesn't mean we stop working on it and raising the quality bar."

No... that's actually exactly what it means. Going gold means the branch is cut, it's in the can, and discs are being printed. Just admit that you exaggerated for press coverage and get over it. No one really cares about another month delay, but lying about going gold is just bizarre.

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I'm always fascinated by people who insist on applying their own interpretation of something to other people's lives/businesses/processes.

Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new.

I don't understand the fixation of catching people in an alleged lie.. What's the difference whether they genuinely underestimated the time required to do something _they've never done before_ (testing on so many platforms) or whether they actually, completely unreasonably, decided to lie to everyone about having gone gold?

Not to mention that if they hadn't actually gone gold, there are tons of outside parties who would probably have realized it pretty quickly (given the production work that happens), and we'd all have found out anyways.

> Games have been getting "post-gold" updates and day-one patches for like a decade or more.. This is nothing new.

no it is nothing new. is it better than it was in the past? probably not. I mean if I buy a fucking disk and need to redownload the whole content of the disk from the internet anyway, that sucks really hard, for a lot of people. especially for archiving purposes. how can it be that the game is like 40gb and needs a 40gb patch? what did you do past release? rewrite the game?

With asset build pipelines that do lots of preprocessing, compress everything, and pack things with a layout that tries to minimise disk seek time while playing, it's conceivable that relatively small changes in the source data can result in touching large amounts of the final compressed assets.

But I don't work in the industry, so read my statements as just the ramblings of an interested amateur.

Regardless of the technical reasons for them, I personally dislike the reliance on day-0 patches.

these 40gb patches happen because they had to put assets in multiple times in such a way as to cause less seeking time on the internal hard drive. They're too slow this gen to be able to do this all without problems. So games would put various re-used assets in multiple places in the game's file bundles so that when you're in section A of the game it can access that file with all the other files of section A. And likewise it puts a duplicate in section B so that when you're in section B it doesn't have to seek to section A's files to find it, which would be slower.

It sucks and caused some bloat in current gen games due to the duplication. Hopefully with these fast next gen SSDs that disappears.

From what I've gathered this has as much to do with for the Xbox One and PS4 the discs are only "installers" these days (and sometimes worse, just "activation tokens"), and for various reasons both the Xbox One and the PS4 have some very interesting heuristics of what they bother to pull from the disc versus what they just grab from the internet. The Blu-Ray discs on those consoles are slower than people tend to think they are and I get the impression a lot of times the consoles this generation themselves just think it is faster to fetch everything from the internet than to bother trying to pull it from the drive.

I am not familiar enough with gaming jargon, but I must say I am not happy with the trend of businesses deciding to change the meaning of a word and everyone else playing along. For example:

- Unlimited data plan: it means you can use it until you hit 10GB, then the speed will be cut to 40kbps. But hey, you can use as much of the 40kbps speed as you want.

- Lifetime updates: we provide updates until we decide the device has reached end of life, which is approximately the same time as we stop selling that specific model of the device. [0]

- Native application: a web app packaged with Electron

- ...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16258408

"Unlimited" in terms of Internet access/bandwidth has always been a contentious term.

And I mean _always_ because back in 1995 I worked for an ISP and when we introduced our "Unlimited" dial-up plan, I can't tell you the number of people who got mad at us because they couldn't dial in and stay connected 24/7 all month long.

We explained it in our terms of use (and actually had a really clear tl;dr in non-fine print in our ads) that customers could use as much as they could without worry of being charged for overages or getting cut off after a certain number of hours, but it was not a _dedicated_ account that promised 24/7 service.

But certain customers insisted that _their_ interpretation of the word was the one that _we_ should be held to.

One customer even took us to small claims court, and lost.

For the rest, our typical response was to say we were sorry this wasn't the plan they were expecting, and we'd happily refund their most recent month and close their account. That's almost always when they would change their mind and suddenly be ok with the terms. ;-)

That sounds like you're talking about the distinction between an unlimited connection with a SLA, and an unlimited connection provided on a best-effort basis. But the modern corruption of "unlimited" doesn't even rise to the level of "best-effort".

I think the similarity (in my mind) is the "you can't be charged for overages" aspect of it..

Use as much as you can, you won't be charged any more than X dollars per month..

But past a certain point, you will be throttled.. Not cut off, but slowed..

And back in the ISP days, we would actively disconnect high-usage users to free up phone lines during peak times (which was typically 6-10pm on weekdays and 1pm to 10pm on weekends)

Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember a time when ISPs advertised their "user-to-line ratios", meaning we didn't have a phone line for every customer - we maintained a 7:1 ratio which was considered good back then).

So in order to allow the lower-usage customers to get online to check their emails or surf after dinner, we had to make sure that there were lines available.

If you had already used more than (I think - memory is fuzzy here) 150 hours per month, then you were subject to being disconnected during peak hours.

So in effect, we were also throttling them, which is similar to what wireless carriers do today I think...

> So in effect, we were also throttling them, which is similar to what wireless carriers do today I think...

No. Dropping a dial-up connection when all lines are busy is not the same kind of artificial limitation as throttling/de-prioritizing someone's traffic after X GB even if the network is uncongested, or unconditionally throttling specific types of traffic (eg. all video traffic, to prevent HD streaming).

They might actually be printing discs, though. Nowadays, multi-gigabyte day-one patches are commonplace, so all the disk is for is shipping art assets cheaply (and supporting legacy retail sales). So as long as the art assets are 95% done, that’s good enough to “go gold” and start printing.

Nothing says “We don’t give a shit; you gave us your money” quite like having to wait a couple of hours for an update immediately after installing a game.

This is a weird logic I don't understand.

People who don't give a shit don't crunch after the game has gone gold to make last minute improvements and fix more bugs. People who care do.

This has nothing to do with the programmers hustling to get the game done and everything to do with their superiors.

As if the superiors punched out and went home and told the engineers to keep going and fix more bugs.

Software estimates are hard and superiors don't magically have more insight into when the game will actually be finished. It's all a gamble and sometimes you have to postpone the release or ship a buggy product.

Gold has meant nothing since Day 0 patches became a thing.

Gold just means you have a MVP that will pass certification on all platforms. It's content complete and it would, in theory, be fine to play all the way through without a patch. It allows manufacturing and distribution to begin.

There are frequently many tweaks one should do to that product that companies will work on after reaching that point.

This has changed so much over time. Par for the course these days is shipping a buggy mess as a GM. Then a massive as hell Day 1 patch to fix it all.

I forget the exact details but there was a game this current gen that had a 40gb day one patch. I felt so bad for those that bought a disc version just to have to download a massive patch after installing the game.

They explicitly mention the delay is about the Day 0 patch, though, literally the sentence after the one you posted.

Is it illegal to keep working on a game after gold or...?

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